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Child Abuse, Child Neglect, and Fatalities in Homeschooling?
News stories, anecdotes, and some research regarding
school teachers and other personnel doing evil things to students and children have become common in the United States.[1],[2] News stories,
government data, and research reports on parents harming children is also available.[3]
During the past few years, some news stories have implied a special connection between child abuse, child neglect, or child fatalities and homeschooling. This
brief paper addresses the following question: Has any research been done that provides any empirical evidence regarding the rates of child abuse, child neglect, or abuse-related child fatalities in homeschooling families compared to the rates in the subpopulations of families who engage in public schooling or private schooling?
Methods
Since
1983 I have been carefully following research on homeschooling (home education, home-based education, home school) and have acquired an extensive bibliography on it. A recent thorough search of available literature has resulted in identifying only two published reports relevant to the question posed in this paper – one original research study and one report using publicly available data.
Findings
I surveyed adults who were churched while growing up in order to explore and understand the relationship between their church experiences, family relationships, education/schooling experiences, and cultural inputs during childhood and their Christian beliefs and behaviors as adults.[4] The total sample size in this nationwide study is 9,369. As part of this, a nationwide representative sub-sample of 907 subjects was purchased from a national, independent business and used as a comparative baseline to enhance the integrity and validity of the study. Data on how many years they spent in public schools, private secular schools, private Christian schools, and homeschooling during their K-12 school years were collected. Only one question in the
survey instrument (questionnaire) dealt with the abuse of minors (i.e., sexual abuse).
In a simple statistical analysis, it was revealed that those who were homeschooled were significantly less likely to have been sexually abused as minors than were those who were public schooled and those who attended private Christian schools. Further, there was no significant difference in the rate of having been sexually abused as a child between
those who were homeschooled and those who attended private non-Christian schools.
Only one other published report, utilizing publicly available data, appears to have directly addressed the topic of this paper. An organization called Homeschooling’s Invisible Children published a summary of various sources of information in an attempt to address child fatality rates within homeschooling families compared to non-homeschooling families.[5] One source of their information is their own collection of “… publicly available online news articles and, in some instances, court records to find and document the cases of severe abuse or neglect in homeschool settings.” Additionally, the HIC authors used information from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to estimate the number of fatalities among
school age children each year. In conjunction, the authors used data from the National Center for Education Statistics to estimate the percentages of children homeschooled each year. Based on the percentage of children homeschooled each year and the total number of fatalities among school age children, HIC estimated the number of “expected” child fatalities among homeschool families. HIC then concluded that the rate of child fatalities in the homeschooling community was not statistically
significantly different from the “expected” rate. “This finding does not yet reach the threshold for statistical significance …,” according to their report (HIC, paragraph 11).
Conclusions
To date, there has been only one report of research utilizing original data directly related to homeschooling and child abuse, child neglect, and child
fatalities. That study asked one question regarding sexual abuse and found that adults who had been home educated reported being abused at a lower rate than those in two other groups and at the same rate as a third group. One organization (in another article) worked to collect information from various sources in an attempt to estimate child fatality rates within the homeschool population. The authors of that article found no significant difference in fatality rates between the general public and
the homeschool population. Based on this very limited base of information, one might say that there is no reliable, empirical evidence that homeschooled children experience any more abuse, neglect or fatalities due to neglect than do children who attend public or private institutional school.
--Brian D. Ray, Ph.D. National Home Education Research
Institute
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Endnotes:
[2] Stop Educator Sexual Abuse Misconduct and Exploitation. (2016). Retrieved January 25, 2016 from www.sesamenet.org.
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